Saturday, December 13, 2014

Into The Odd - mini review

Into The Odd

Seems suspiciously rules-lite; I mean there's little to get in the way of a fast game with 3 stats and HP. I'm seriously trying hard to imagine so simple a game... There was that one mod that reduced the DW stats to just the modifiers that the 3d6 would have given you - admirable, in my opinion.

character creation is Lickety split, and the main drivers of the game : arcana are essentially weird magic items. Level advancement comes in a couple of simple well-delineated stages.

I could see some really trippy mods for this : Luck, Dungeon World moves, Realms of Crawling Chaos items. Sanity rules maybe, and uh, that Oz game I always go on about could get shoehorned in there.

It's class- and race-free, and the setting is implicitly freeing to cook up your own stuff. I think you could use this to play "Over The Garden Wall" from last month like in about 4 minutes you're off and running. A nice compromise between some more trad RPG and narrative type things

I'm suitably intrigued. Very easy to grok and customize and quaint and charming little pseudo random charts are abounding. It's vague enough to permit a great deal of creativity and just barely rulesy enough to stay together for a game that will need no consultation of the book under time pressure

3.5 out of 5.3 wizard hats, with a finger of algae-laced bourbon floated over the top